Prince Rama – Bahia

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Prince Rama is a music machine shaped like a cubic prism and all clad in holographic material, which spits utopist space-time extravaganzas in garish choreographies of laser beams, uncombed hair and pop songs. Also, they’re fucking crazy.

The psych-dance duo, composed by sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson, a foot in Brooklyn’s music scene, the other in the hippest circuits of the American art world and a third transcendent one firmly rooted in Vaishnava metaphysics, was discovered in 2010 by Animal Collective‘s Avey Tare, who released their lavish “Now Age” deranged sci-fi neon fantasies on his imprint Paw Tracks. “Xtreme Now”, their forthcoming album, is going to be out on Carpark Records instead, March 4th, and you can listen to the first single, a shimmery edenic Italo Disco jam titled “Bahia”, below.

Isn’t it something? With its funky energetic synths lifted straight from the kind of semi-forgotten dance songs that charted low in 1987, “Bahia” is an irresistible sugar rush from the future as it was imagined thirty years ago. This is what you would hear on the radio if Doc’s Delorean sprinted up all the way to 2067.

2067 is the year the whole “Xtreme Now” universe is set in. According to what the Larson sisters say, the album was written while they were living in a black metal utopian commune on the island of Vormsi, off the coast of Estonia. There, inside a Viking ruin, Taraka experienced an episode of time-schizophrenia, during which she existed in both the Middle Ages and the year 2067. In the future she saw, museums are sponsored by energy drinks and art merged with extreme sports. “Xtreme Now” is the score to that world, where creating and defying death are one thing. Weird back-story aside, the new songs, on which the girls worked with Alex Epton of XXXChange, are going to be powerful and absolutely catchy.